From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

Publishing Peacemaker

Gamepolitics blogs that Manifesto will publish Peacemaker, the sim developed at Carnegie-Mellon that "allows the player to try his or her skills of diplomacy and leadership by playing as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President," in the words of the development team's press release.

Download the demo!

Link: GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » Award-Winning Israeli-Palestinian Sim Brought to Market.

See also: older Peacemaker coverage

Maoist Game Reviews

Electronic game reviews written for the Maoist Internationalist Movement website. An example: from the review of Shattered Union:

Despite its white nationalist outlook, "Shattered Union" has upset some "war gamers." The Wargamer, an online site for those who enjoy war pornography (www.thewargamer.com), had a few threads in its forums about how hurtful imperialists thought "Shattered Union" was. They didn't like the concept of their KKKountry falling apart and took time out of their cheerleading of U.$. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan to make this opinion known. Tough Shit, your kkkountry's days are numbered. The overwhelming majority of the world is going to shatter your union one of these days and there is nothing you and your beer and pretzels crowd can do about it.

And some commentary on a Full Spectrum Warrior billboard:

This billboard for a videogame up at Fort Bragg in North Carolina proves MIM's point that video games are not politically neutral. Brainwashed by militarism, bored people take up countless militarist games and real world killing just for excitement. Even pornography video games are not as popular. If people had more social control of their lives instead of just the illusion of "freedom," they would not be playing so many games like this one. Under capitalism, game-makers produce what is profitable. Under the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations over imperialism, games glorifying Uncle $am will be history and game-makers will flourish without having to cater to mindless sex and violence.

Old news, perhaps.  But that joint dictatorship of the proletariat thing sounds like a great plan.

These MIM guys should check out Soviet Untersagersdorf. Or maybe Poly Play.

Link: MIM bookstore.

R&R meets D&D

Ziggurat Con: Skedded for June 9, It'll be the first Dungeons and Dragons convention to take place in a country at war.  Named after the nearby city of Ur and "open to all allied military personnel and civilian contractors in Iraq."

Geeks who want to support our troops can donate 20-sided die and other materials for the effort.

Link: Ziggurat Con - The World's First War Zone Game Convention? | Gamegrene.com. (tipped off by Andrew Wearing)

Gamer Theory event in NYC

Hey book readers: release events this week for the new treeware edition of Mackenzie Wark's GAM3R 7H30RY, now called Gamer Theory. See below! It's in Manhattan this coming wednesday in a building what that I assume is part of the agglutinative New School complex.

what: McKenzie Wark will present, and lead a discussion of his new book Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press). Jaeho Kang (Sociology, The New School for Social Reseach) will act as the respondent.

where: Wolff Conference Room, 2nd floor, 65 5th avenue (between 14th and 13th streets)

when: 6-8PM, Wednesday 18th April 2007

then: drinks & games at Barcade, 388 Union Ave Williamsburg (L train to Lorrimer st, take Union exit)

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Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press)

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

McKenzie Wark
Teach culture & media at Eugene Lang College and sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of about seven books, most recently A Hacker Manifesto, also published by Harvard University Press.

Jaeho Kang
Before coming to The New School, he was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, Germany. He has a book in progress, Media Critique: Walter Benjamin and the Spectacle of Modernity, and has published articles on the social theories of Benjamin, Marcuse, Foucault, and Habermas.

Presented by the department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research.

Army Goes Casual

Dunno when these went up, but the Army's recruitment site GoArmy.com now has a set of Army-branded casual games available for potential enlistees looking to kill some time.

There's a very simple football game, a rifle marksmanship game, a "Patriot Missile launch simulator" and a more elaborate "Blackhawk Challenge."

As relatively basic flash games, there's not much here akin to the much-touted realism of America's Army. These titles present a much more distant relationship to real-world affairs. The football game is an extension of the branding benefits provided by Army athletics, and the Patriot missle game is rather abstract. The marksmanship game, for example, involves synching up two moving lines into a crosshair. Though I found this rather fun, I certainly hope there aren't any actual firing systems that work this way.

Link: GoArmy.com > Games & Downloads > Games.

Talk at RPI

For those of you in upstate New York, I'll be doing a talk at Rensselaer this Wednesday, April 11. Details are here. The event is free and open to the public.

(Photo above is from RPI's website and depicts a typical moment of RPI student enrichment.)

Take it to the Next Level

A new Army ad targets gamers. Not obliquely, but head on:

Reminds me of an anecdote I found for the book about military recruiters haunting arcades in the 80s, giving joystick warriors free Cokes and quarters, then telling them they had stuff just like that but cooler in the service.

Noted on Joystiq, but emailed to me by Scott Jon Siegel